The plan of forming a select committee of the General Assembly nominated by the mayor seems to have been a very favourite custom. In Coventry, for example, the mayor summoned certain citizens who were added to the twenty-four to form a common council. Their number was perhaps at first uncertain, for in 1444 we hear of a meeting of fifty-three, twenty-four of the council and twenty-nine other burgesses; but apparently from 1477 twenty-four citizens always assembled with the twenty-four jurats to form the common council of forty-eight. Generally, as in Leicester or Gloucester, a fixed number of representative citizens was summoned. A lower chamber of this pattern evidently assured the triumph of the oligarchy; and the idea of popular control was perhaps more completely banished by this narrow and formal interpretation of the common right of meeting than by mere idle neglect of the assembly. In Nottingham, so far as we can judge from the few council minutes preserved during the sixteenth century, the mayor and his brethren acted with perfect independence of the burgesses at large, and no longer mentioned the name of the community even in ordinances which touched the common lands.[701]
Still, however, the jury fought with indefatigable zeal for some control over administration.[702] They never let slip a chance of reprimanding their governors. Again and again the mayor was presented for refusing to enforce judgment on bakers, butchers, and brewers,[703] and with his brethren was charged with innumerable frauds on the people. Sometimes we find the jury busied about securing a capable schoolmaster;[704] sometimes they were demanding to have the accounts laid before them—the accounts of the bridge and the free school and the sums raised for the burgesses of Parliament, “and how the residue of the money is bestowed, for our money is therein as well as yours was, and therefore it is convenient that we know.”[705] As Englishmen had once looked back to the times of the good King Edward, so the men of Nottingham turned wistfully to the golden past when the Red Book had been the charter of their liberties, and vainly prayed that the necessary parts of the book (doubtless the ancient town ordinances) should as of old be read yearly in the hearing of the burgesses.[706] Clinging to the ideal of a primitive liberty, these inveterate conservatives robbed reform of all the terrors that attached to what was new. What had been might safely be again. Nor was there any tendency to riot or disorder. All must be done in a constitutional way, and within the limits of tradition. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, therefore, there was a good deal of tinkering at the municipal constitution. On March 29 (1577) the number of councillors was increased from six to twelve, all as before to be chosen by the Clothing.[707] The democracy had probably very little to say to this change, for the order was made by forty-five burgesses “being then all of the degree of chamberlains” who seem here clearly to be acting as though their assent to an ordinance were equivalent to the consent of the whole community.[708] Six months later, however, it occurred to the people to make some use of the ancient custom of summoning a jury of forty-eight from town and suburbs for public business; and they proposed to have the common council elected by such a jury—to which suggestion the ruling class agreed. They further demanded that the councillors should attend at the Leet when the Mickletorn jury presented offences and gave their verdicts. All this was, as they claimed, a return to the authentic custom of former days, “according to the Red Book as we do think.”[709] But in November the Leet jury were still praying that this agreement should be carried out, and there is no evidence that they ever succeeded. In any case, two years later, when the people once more urged their old claim to have the accounts made public and “to hear the end and reckoning of any subsidy when any is,”[710] they advanced a new demand for reform yet more radical; and suggested that all the common councillors should be utterly abolished, leaving only the aldermen and two coroners to form an upper chamber, “and that the forty-eight may be joined to you to confer in any matters for the town, as there is in other places where their corporations are better governed than this is,”[711] and that the same forty-eight as representing the commons should be given a definite share in the management of the bridge and school.[712]
But all these efforts proved vain, and the Council and Clothing continued their victorious career. As late as 1598 the commons endeavoured to revive the old constitution of the town and to call a general assembly through summons by the constables of the wards; and even collected money to institute a suit that they might inquire into a corrupt lease of common property by a member of the council. In the curious account preserved of the examination and depositions of the ringleaders in calling the assembly together the passionate determination of the people still finds voice, and there was at least one among them to maintain stoutly that he did not care if he died in a good cause.[713] The beginning of the next century found the contest slowly dragging along, the Mickletorn jury still protesting against the negligence of the councillors[714] and the people still discussing new constitutions with increasing nicety of detail, and debating the merits of two chambers of twenty-four and forty-eight,[715] or of twenty-eight each.[716] Meanwhile the twelve of the council are mentioned as existing unchanged in 1604.[717]
By this time the men of Nottingham had adopted in turn all the constitutional means of securing popular freedom that lay in their reach. They had consistently appealed to the old ordinances which in theory at least endowed them with sovereign power. The Mickletorn jury had been incessantly called on to right their wrongs by force of law. The cumbrous machinery of the general assembly had been dragged out in its noisy inefficiency. The custom of summoning forty-eight jurors for public purposes had been seized on as an institution out of which a chamber of the commons might be created and representative government established. But the mediæval history of Nottingham closes with the utter failure of schemes so industriously cherished. Doubtless reform had tarried too long in coming. Whether the general commercial prosperity had drawn all activity into trading enterprise and diverted it from politics, whether a common well-being had tended to an acquiescent conservatism, whether the variety of trades carried on in the town had, as in modern Birmingham, resulted in the absence of effective trade organization or of any strong and commanding craft guild to serve as a centre of union, or whether in this wealthy community buried in the Midlands there was some lack of ready interchange of thought and discussion with the outer world, the fact remains that resistance to the dominion of an oligarchy was of late and ineffectual growth, and when it did appear it seems to have mostly lost its energies in talk. In 1600 the men of Nottingham were still discussing the formation of a House of Commons to represent the will of the people—an experiment which Norwich had tried two hundred years before, and for which in municipal life it was now two hundred years too late.
Thus in the history of civic freedom Nottingham seems to stand midway between Southampton and Norwich. Not only did it in the fifteenth century closely follow Southampton in the critical dates of its municipal history, but it is certain that its local administration must have been a matter of no less importance to the Crown from a military point of view. In times of disturbance it was all-important to the king to keep a firm hold on the Midlands and on their central stronghold, and preserve as it were a “buffer state” between north and south, east and west; and we have seen how quick was the central government to take alarm at any “confederacy” to “subvert the good rule of the town,” and how anxiously, as in Southampton, it interfered to protect the select oligarchy against the “sinister labour” of the commons. On the other hand the belief of its people in an ideal liberty, steeped as it is in strong emotion, is far removed from the apathy of the Southampton burghers. In the aspirations of its commonalty Nottingham comes nearer to Norwich, but here there is a profound difference not only in the conduct of the controversy between rulers and subjects but in its final issue; and the council of the commons which the oligarchy was able to assemble by stealth in Nottingham has no likeness to the lower chamber created by the middle classes themselves in Norwich.
CHAPTER XIV
THE COMMON COUNCIL OF NORWICH